Book review

Review of Sergey Tyulenev & Wenyan Luo, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sociology

Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2025. xxv + 552 pp.

The rapid expansion of sociological approaches in Translation and Interpreting Studies (TIS) over the last two decades has created both momentum and fragmentation. While foundational works such as Buzelin (2005), Inghilleri (2005), and Wolf and Fukari (2007) provided incisive theoretical starting points, the field has lacked an integrated reference work capable of drawing its diverse strands into a coherent intellectual map. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sociology, edited by Sergey Tyulenev and Wenyan Luo is the first work to undertake this task. Bringing together thirty-five chapters written by experts across continents, the handbook not only surveys a field now too vast for any single theoretical paradigm to contain but also treats translation as a “universal social mediator” (xx–xxi), an ambitious conceptualization intended to unify divergent sociological perspectives. The result is a wide-ranging and carefully curated volume that succeeds in offering a panoramic overview of sociological approaches to translation as well as a timely intervention in shaping the field’s theoretical and methodological contours.